The NIXT, or Normal Incidence X-ray Telescope, was a

sounding rocket A sounding rocket or rocketsonde, sometimes called a research rocket or a suborbital rocket, is an instrument-carrying rocket designed to take measurements and perform scientific experiments during its sub-orbital flight. The rockets are used to ...

payload flown in the 1990s by Professor Leon Golub of the

Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) is a research institute of the Smithsonian Institution, concentrating on astrophysical studies including galactic and extragalactic astronomy, cosmology, solar, earth and planetary sciences, the ...

, to prototype normal-incidence (conventional) optical designs in

extreme ultraviolet Extreme ultraviolet radiation (EUV or XUV) or high-energy ultraviolet radiation is electromagnetic radiation in the part of the electromagnetic spectrum spanning wavelengths from 124 nm down to 10 nm, and therefore (by the Planck– ...

(EUV) solar imaging. In the EUV, the surface of the

Sun The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is a nearly perfect ball of hot plasma, heated to incandescence by nuclear fusion reactions in its core. The Sun radiates this energy mainly as light, ultraviolet, and infrared radi ...

appears dark, and hot structures in the

solar corona A corona ( coronas or coronae) is the outermost layer of a star's atmosphere. It consists of plasma. The Sun's corona lies above the chromosphere and extends millions of kilometres into outer space. It is most easily seen during a total solar e ...

appear bright; this allows study of the structure and dynamics of the solar corona near the surface of the Sun, which is not possible using

visible light Light or visible light is electromagnetic radiation that can be perceived by the human eye. Visible light is usually defined as having wavelengths in the range of 400–700 nanometres (nm), corresponding to frequencies of 750–420 te ...

. NIXT and its sister rocket, the

MSSTA The Multi-spectral solar telescope array, or MSSTA, was a sounding rocket payload built by Professor A.B.C. Walker, Jr. at Stanford University in the 1990s to test EUV/XUV imaging of the Sun using normal incidence EUV-reflective multilayer opti ...

, were the prototypes for all normal-incidence EUV imaging instruments in use today, including SOHO/EIT,

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, and STEREO/SECCHI. In 1989, a NIXT sounding rocket launch detected soft X-Rays coming from a

Solar flare A solar flare is an intense localized eruption of electromagnetic radiation in the Sun's atmosphere. Flares occur in active regions and are often, but not always, accompanied by coronal mass ejections, solar particle events, and other solar phe ...

. It was launched when the solar event was detected to allow high resolution imaging of the Sun's

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. Results from the observations were presented in 1990 in different papers. NIXT was launched throughout the early 1990s and a paper summarizing the results from these mission was published in 1996. A successor program to NIXT, was the TXI (Tunable XUV Imager) sounding rocket program

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A Normal Incidence X-ray Telescope (NIXT) sounding rocket payload
X-ray telescopes Sounding rockets {{astronomy-stub Solar space observatories

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